Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (30 page)

But then why did the True God let this half-assed god, the Demiurge, get away with making such a flawed universe in the first place? I think Gordon himself provides part of the answer (with a little coaching from his daimon) in a book he’s going to write in his early twenties called
The Sensuous Hermit
. Since that book is already written from the perspective of eternity, and I’m still able to skip around in the past and future, I’ll just quote from the relevant passage here:

“There’s a Yiddish saying that God made man because He loves stories. The Sensuous Hermit has a more refined version of that same essential idea. It’s his contention that before the universe began there was only God–the One, the Absolute, the Unknown and Unknowable. But even God couldn’t comprehend Himself in that con1dition. To be conscious of his Oneness, He had to be less than One. Thus was born two-ness, or duality, with all the attendant distractions of that condition: light and dark, life and death, good and evil, love and fear, oil and vinegar, and so on. The truth is, we’re all still One with God, but at the moment we happen to be functioning as a kind of enchanted mirror that tells God stories about his true nature. Or better yet, the universe is one huge
roman à clef
in which the secret identity of every character is none other than the Absolute Author.”

Like I said, that’s part of it. But here’s a more radical spin on that same basic idea: What if mankind was once a single angelic being that fell from grace and was transformed, during the Big Bang, into the material universe as a means of salvation? What if shards of that fallen angelic personality could be found everywhere–in every rock, dinosaur, shark, tree, rainbow, bear, and person? And what if the ultimate purpose of all those fragmented personalities was to spiritually evolve into wholeness, back into that original angelic being–with increased knowledge of its own good and evil–which would in turn allow it to merge once more with the loving grace of the True God. If all of that were true, then we’d finally have a reasonable theological explanation for all the suffering in the world:

It’s self-inflicted.

Why does evil shit happen? Because we need to experience it. We need to know what evil is all about so we can strive to embody its opposite: spiritual good. But in a world like I’ve described, we could never be quite sure of our moral bearings. We’d be living under Kierkegaard’s dictum that when we’re feeling our most saintly, we could actually be working for the devil (Jerry Falwell and some of the more rabid popes come to mind…). Conversely, an act that seems evil might actually serve to nudge millions of souls toward salvation. Christ’s crucifixion would be the obvious example, but there are others. I’m not saying this is true, but what if I told you that every soul involved in the Holocaust actually volunteered for it?

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” That’s another of Kierkegaard’s dictums. It explains why we need to spend time on the Other Side between incarnations. We do it so we can kick back and take a long look at our lives and try to figure out what the hell has been going on.

DINKEY CREEK

I
n the morning, when Gordon wakes up inside the tent and smells the warm, dry air redolent of pine needles, his heart leaps in joy with the realization that he’s no longer in Kingsburg, but camping instead at Dinkey Creek. There’s an unfamiliar taste in his mouth from sleeping outdoors all night, and his hair feels stiffer–more like an animal’s fur. These are good things. He can’t wait to get up, but Jimmy is still sleeping, so he decides to stay in his sleeping bag and read for a while. He has a collection of W.H. Auden’s poetry in his suitcase. He opens the book at random to a poem called “They”:

Where do they come from? Those whom we so much dread,

as on our dearest location falls the chill

  of their crooked wing and endangers

  the melting friend, the aqueduct, the flower.

Terrible Presences that the ponds reflect

back at the famous and, when the blond boy

  bites eagerly into the shining

  apple, emerge in their shocking fury,

and we realize the woods are deaf and the sky

nurses no one, and we are awake and these,

  like farmers, have purpose and knowledge,

  but towards us their hate is directed.

We are the barren pastures to which they bring

the resentment of outcasts; on us they work

  out their despair; they wear our weeping

  as the disgraceful badge of their exile.

There’s more, but Gordon’s mind is drifting off into thoughts about Archons and Overlords
.
Is it true? Do dark powers really pursue us in this life? Are we at the mercy of ‘the ruler of the kingdom of the air’ (or some twisted Demiurge…) like Paul said?

“Can’t you keep your nose out of a book even while you’re on vacation?” Jimmy is sitting up, scowling at Gordon from across the tent.

“I was waiting for you to get up.”

“Well, I’m up. C’mon, let’s go catch some fish.”

Outside the tent, Mr. and Mrs. Marrsden have opened one of the Igloo coolers and set up a Coleman stove on top of a picnic table. They’re cooking bacon, eggs, and french-fried potatoes. Mixed in with a whiff of campfire smoke on the pine-heavy air, it’s the most delicious smell Gordon has ever experienced. Jimmy’s mother hands the boys paper plates that become increasingly transparent with grease as she loads them up with food and everyone sits down to eat. Gordon rarely has an appetite, but today he’s having the hungriest morning of his life. Maybe it’s because he emptied the contents of his stomach at the entrance to Dinkey Creek. Or maybe it’s because he’s finally free of Kingsburg and his mother’s indifferent cooking (
Open one can of Del Monte Creamed Corn. Heat in microwave. Serve with Wonder Bread and pre-packaged slices of Kraft’s American cheese. Makes dinner for two).

After breakfast the boys take their fishing gear and head for a swimming hole that Jimmy knows about called Honeymoon Pool. They follow a winding tar road past other campsites where parents and children interact with bird-like happiness, each little group twittering around a pile of ashes from the previous night’s campfire. Gordon and Jimmy stride past them with their fishing rods held high on their shoulders. They’re two young heroes ready to do some manly bartering with nature, each determined to catch enough trout to feed a whole family–and maybe some of their friendly neighbors as well.

Stepping off the road, Jimmy leads them along a narrow path over half-exposed tree roots and under branches until they come to a steep flight of concrete steps leading down the side of a gorge. The steps (138 in all, Gordon will count later) end on top of a distant gray boulder sitting astride two deep granite pools. The pools are fed by a series of waterfalls cascading through a mossy chute of stones. The smaller of those two pools, Jimmy promises, is always roiling with trout.

It’ll be a long climb back up,
thinks Gordon, feeling for his asthma inhaler. His lungs are already straining for more oxygen in the thin mountain air. He asks, “Are you sure this is really the best place to fish?”

“Sometimes girls go nude sunbathing down there,” Jimmy says with a smirk.

Nothing more needs to be said. Gordon heads down the steps without any care as to whether he’ll have enough lung-capacity for the trip back up.

The view on the way down reminds Gordon of those Chinese nature paintings brushed in ink on long scrolls by artists with names like Wu Hu and Yi Ha: elongated mountains, bonsai-looking trees growing from the sides of sheer cliffs, and maybe a fanciful pagoda or some wispy-bearded hermit smoking an opium pipe way off in the distance. Admittedly, Gordon doesn’t see any drugged-out hermits nodding off in his immediate vicinity, but a magnificent bald eagle is riding the wind currents high above the canyon, which seems equally picturesque. It’s a very Zen moment for him.

“Watch out for rattlers,” Jimmy says.

“Rattlesnakes?” Gordon asks, suddenly fearful, remembering the snake from his dream.

“Yeah. They like to sun themselves on these steps.”

So much for Zen. On closer inspection, that bald eagle turns out to be a turkey vulture. Squirrels chatter madly as screeching black ravens try to poke out their eyes in the scrub. In Gordon’s anxious, overheating imagination, a scorpion suddenly lurks under every wildflower. Nature, he’s reminded, is a calamity, a constant struggle for survival–“red in tooth and claw” as Tennyson said. It’s hard to understand why a supposedly benevolent God would create a world in which the fundamental rule governing all life is:
Eat or be eaten
. Why can’t we all get our sustenance from basking in sunlight and breathing clean air? Why do we have to shove once-living things down our throats and turn them into
turds
, of all things?

“It’d be cool if we saw a girl naked,” Jimmy says, thinking out loud about a somewhat different aspect of nature.

It doesn’t take Gordon long to agree with him. “However screwed up the world may be,” he says, “at least God did one thing right when he invented naked women.”

“Yeah, but even there he could have done a little better. He should have made it so they never get old and saggy. And what if they were a lot more horny for guys like us? I’ve had dreams about stuff like that.”

“That would be so great,” Gordon says, feeling a little dreamy himself. “And there should be no more sexually-transmitted diseases.”

“I know! That’s so screwed up. Sex is natural. You shouldn’t have to worry about catching something that’ll make you go blind or crazy every time you get it on. And pregnancies should be, like, totally controllable.”

Before they reach the bottom of the steps, the two would-be teen deities have laid out plans for a new earthly paradise. In their world, pepperoni pizzas will grow up from the ground like toadstools. Limitless quantities of imported beer will flow from taps in the trunk of every tree (Guinness Stout from Black Oaks, Löwenbräu from Lodgepole Pines, and so on…). No one will ever have to work, unless they want to, thanks to cheap robotics. Pain, sickness, and hunger will be unheard of and all the sadness and madness of the world will simply fade away. Due to an improved worldwide system of digestion, bowel movements will no longer be necessary, although pissing will be retained as an option, with greatly increased bladder capacity, allowing men to put out fires started by burning piles of autumn leaves–or to scrawl Emily Dickinson poems in the snow. Penises will be lengthened accordingly. All women will embody their own ideals of personal beauty and never have to grow old, so long as they promise to wear slutty underwear and refrain from excessive bitchery. Free love will be actively encouraged. Churches will be turned into public burlesque houses in which joy-filled striptease contests will take place every Tuesday and Thursday. Libraries will finally be recognized as the true churches, where angels communicate with mortals. The language barrier will dissolve and wars between nations will cease when every person on Earth discovers that he or she can communicate by instant telepathy. Telepathy will not turn out to be popular for ordinary conversation, however–because once you know what someone’s
really
thinking, you’ll usually wish they would just shut the hell up. (An experiment giving dogs and cats the power of speech will be abandoned for similar reasons.) Certain people will discover they can breathe at the bottom of the ocean like lobsters or fly through the air like owls, while others will become unbeatable at Scrabble. Everyone will accomplish at least one feat in his or her lifetime that was previously thought to be impossible. A universe run by teenage gods should be fun and challenging, above all else, but not
too
challenging, so no one feels left out. Stoners, jocks, and Certified Public Accountants will all have their place–but people like Joseph Coors and other greedy industrialists and corrupt politicians who’ve been trying to ruin the planet might have to atone for their sins by living as horticulturist monks for a few thousand years. It could take a generation or two before everything is completely cleared up, but by then life will be much more worth living. No one will ever want to die, but if they do, they’ll have the consolation of being reincarnated. A quick tour of heaven and then they’ll head right back, because Earth will be where the action’s at.

The boys are still thinking up ways to right the wrongs in a malign universe when they see an old woman at the bottom of the steps. It’s almost supernatural, the way she just appeared out of nowhere, but she looks real enough. She’s wearing a faded pink sweatshirt with an iron-on decal of a moose ambling across her sagging bosom (no bra), and dirty white painter’s pants. A San Francisco Giants baseball cap hides most of her stringy gray hair. She’s carrying a Fiberglas bait-casting rod and at her feet there’s a plastic five-gallon bucket half-full of water and flopping fish.

“I hope you boys brought along more than one kind of bait,” she says, not bothering to say hello first. “Those picky little fishies just turned up their noses at my salmon eggs this morning. You want some apple?” She pulls a green apple out of her pocket and offers it to Gordon.

“Um, sure. Thanks,” Gordon says politely, reaching for the apple. The old woman takes a bite out of it first. She chews in that zestful, loose-lipped way old people chew when they’re trying to show a youngster how good something tastes–or how good life seems to them in general. Gordon observes a white froth of juice dribbling down her age-spotted chin as if she’s just had a stroke. She hands him the apple and he takes a bite out of the side she hasn’t slobbered on–not that he’s afraid of old lady germs, but still… it pays to be careful.

“Hellgrammites are what caught these,” the old woman says, kicking the bucket to stir up her fish. “I’d give you some, but I ran out.”